Derby Talk

Derby Talk is a forum for Pinewood Derby, Awana Grand Prix, Kub Kar Rally, Shape N Race Derby, Space Derby, Raingutter Regatta and other similar races where a child and an adult work together to create a race vehicle and a lot of fun and memories

Last night I demoed the inflatable Raingutter Regatta Raceway at our District's Cub Scout Roundtable Meeting. This thing is awesome! With a cheap hand pump from Wal-Mart like this one, I was able to inflate it in under 2 minutes. It takes about 7 gallons of water per lane (not 4 like it says on the box) to get the water deep enough. I had 14 one gallon jugs on hand. In all it took us about 10 minutes to have it fully set up. I ran some races with the adults to make sure that there were no problems with the track. Then we took it down. It has drain holes at one end. We set up rotating 5 gallon buckets to get rid of the water. The drains have zero side spill so all of the water goes into the bucket. After a quick towel dry, I deflated the track with the same hand pump. Teardown took about 15 minutes. All of this was done with no water spillage. This was $25 well spent. There was even one Pack that was talking about switching from their traditional gutters to this due to the ease of setup.

If these are the ones they sell at the Scout Shop, we bought one and used it as a practice gutter for our twins for a couple of years. They are great devices for practicing for sure. We do have one small quibble about them. Our boys' method of blowing into the boats' sails is to almost put their ears onto the water (head tilted sideways) so they can blow directly into the sail, and parallel to the deck of the boat. The raised, inflated sides of the gutters made it pretty hard for the boys to get down low, near the water-line, and parallel to the boat deck to blow effectively.

But we still used them, and the twins won multiple Regattas using them for practice.